Bird migration analysis example

Binder IPYNB HTML

This tutorial uses data published on Movebank, specifically: Navigation experiments in lesser black-backed gulls (data from Wikelski et al. 2015)-gps.csv

This tutorial covers:

  1. Trajectory data preprocessing
    • Loading movement data from common geospatial file formats
    • Exploring spatial & non-spatial data distributions
    • Converting GeoDataFrames into Trajectories describing continuous tracks of moving objects
  2. Trajectory data analysis
    • Investigating individual trajectories
    • Comparing different years
    • Investigating trajectories of multiple individuals

Loading the bird movement data

This is what the data looks like:

Let's see how many individuals we have in the dataset:

The records per individual are not evenly distributed:

Finally, let's create trajectories:

And let's generalize them to speed up the following analyses:

Investigating individual trajectories

Let's pick out a specific individual. For example, '91916A' is the individual with most records in our dataset:

This individual has been travelling back and forth for quite a few years!

One way to take a closer look at this individual's travels is to split the overall track into yearly trips:

Now we can explore individual years:

Let's see where this individual was on a specific day:

Of course, it might also be of interest to see the different locations on a certain day each year:

It's pretty clear that this individual does not follow the same schedule and route every year. However, it seems to always be heading to the same area Red Sea coast to spend the winter there.

Let's find its arrival times in this area:

Investigating trajectories of multiple individuals

Multiple individuals travel to this area every year. Let's have a closer look:

Based on the duration of the individuals' trajectory segments within our area of interest, it looks like some individuals spend the winter here while others only pass through.

For example, Individual '91761A' passed through twice? What has it been up to?

Turns out that this individual does not stay at the Red Sea but continues its journey into Africa.

Continue exploring MovingPandas

  1. Bird migration analysis
  2. Ship data analysis
  3. Horse collar data exploration
  4. OSM traces